Which Mel Brooks Movie Could Be His Next Musical?

I vote for 'Spaceballs'.

Mel Brooks seems to think Broadway is funnier than Hollywood now. Maybe he’s right. The musical Young Frankensteinjust picked up a Saturn Award for Best Local Stage Production for the L.A. run. So it’s not surprising he’d look at another one of his film classics, and add songs to it.

“There’s always a chance of Blazing Saddles on Broadway,” Brooks said. “If they change the critic of the Times, I might consider it. I don’t think he’s in my corner.”

Sure, we’d like to see something, you know, original from the comedy legend. Brooks, however, hopes his legacy will be shepherding the new age of Broadway that has benefited such productions as The Book of Mormon.

“I feel responsible for breaking open musical comedy. Until The Producers, a lot of musicals on Broadway, very little comedy. There was the great Stephen Sondheim and there was Leonard Bernstein but there were very few Guys and Dolls. It was 25 years before we came along with a truly funny musical comedy.”

So why stop at Blazing Saddles? There are fans that would pay to see musicals of Spaceballs or History of the World Part I too. “The line I get most from fans is truthfully ‘It’s good to be the king.’ ‘He was my boyfriend,’ I get a lot of that. It’s good to make all that stuff and it’s wonderful when you have hip audiences and bright people who know what you’re doing and what you’re saying and they appreciate it and they dig it. It makes you gloriously happy. The money ain’t bad either.”